New Kaiser Health Tracking Poll: 50% Want to Keep or Expand the Law

How can you tell if Republicans are lying when they claim that “the American people” want the health care reform law repealed? Based on all the polling evidence (an no, Rasmussen doesn’t count – on this subject or any other), their lips are moving! Today, we have yet more evidence, courtesy of the Kaiser Family Foundation’s new poll. Here are the key findings.

*30% of Americans want to expand the health care law, while 20% want to keep it as is. That’s 50% who want to leave it alone or expand it.

*10% of Americans aren’t sure what Congress should do.

*That leaves the remaining 40% (actually, 39% due to rounding) of Americans who either want to “repeal and replace” (19%) or just repeal it outright (20%).

*To recap, that’s 50% who want to keep it or expand it, 39% who want to repeal it. So much for Republicans’ claim that “the American people want to repeal Obamacare” (their pejorative, juvenile name for the law).

*In other news, Americans overwhelmingly approve of the major, individual features contained in the law, except for one – the requirement to carry insurance or pay a (small) fine. Other than that, we’re talking about 70%-80% approval for most aspects of the law.

*As for the Teapublican efforts to cut off funding for implementation of the health care law, Americans disapprove of defunding by a 61%-34% margin. Again, so much for the BONEr/Can’tor line about how “the American people want…”

*Finally, the level of knowledge about this law is not exactly sky high. For instance, “nearly half the country either believes that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) has been repealed and is no longer law (22 percent) or doesn’t know enough to say whether it is still law (26 percent).” Combine media FAIL with Republican/right-wing noise machine propaganda, and that’s what you get, apparently.